by Elissa Caterfino Mandel

My beach alias wouldn’t be Surfer Girl; it would be Shade Searcher. Beach umbrellas and canopies are my preferred modes of beachwear. Sun counts as high risk.

But there we were in January at the Gaia Resort in Costa Rica, smack dab in the middle of a reserve for macaws and beachgoers. The beach was a shuttle ride away, and the resort sat on top of a major hill too treacherous for hiking in sandals.

It was also, apparently, too treacherous for the golf cart we were using to ride back to our room.

My story begins in that cart with a man who barely spoke English, and much as it sometimes seem that he and I speak a different language, I’m not referring to my husband. As the golf cart driver tried to power the cart up the hill, he pointed. Flapping the hand that he took off the wheel as if it were a wing, he gestured again. I think we were supposed to intuit that he saw a bird. “Macaws,” my husband said. The driver nodded, and he indicated the birds in a group of trees at eye level. Then the driver held up his phone, motioning for us to get out. We’d seen macaws before but at a distance, and this was an opportunity to capture them so they’d be more than colorful distant specks on our Iphones.

“Stay there,” Hal said to me. “Let me go first.”

If only. Hal’s feet tangled as he hopped out of the cart, and he ended up on his tush on the ground. Righting himself for a brief second on the uneven turf, he fell again, only this time it was over his perpetually untied shoelaces. From there somehow, he tumbled over the low retaining wall, and he began rolling down a hill. Ok. Let me mention that Hal is almost 70 years old. Let me emphasize that the hill was steep; hence, the retaining wall. Let me suggest that perhaps the photo-obliging golf cart driver never should have stopped the cart where he did; we were on the upward incline of a hill that was a calf killer the few times we’d walked it. And let me repeat that we were in Costa Rica in a beach community called Manuel Antonio; it’s miles from a major medical center, to say nothing of a decent restaurant.

I pictured the hospital bills, the broken bones, the paralysis… Had we even renewed our Medjet membership? That’s the thing you pay $500 a year for in hopes you never actually use it. It transports you by air, free of charge, to the best medical center in your relative vicinity. I can see the envelope now, sitting home, unopened in the box in my kitchen, on my perennial to-do list.

Midway into Hal’s third roll, he was stopped by the very same tree where the macaws once perched. They were no longer there. They’d been scared away by the sound of me screaming.

By this time, I was out of the cart, and it wasn’t until Hal stood up and started laughing that I breathed. Oh, good. This would be relegated to the annals of “funny vacation story,” like the time I’d inadvertently stepped into the wading pool at the Hollywood Hyatt in my sneakers because I had a book in my face and my reading glasses on.

In retrospect, the most disturbing thing about the incident is that our golf cart driver just sat there. He never asked how Hal was or indicated he was concerned in any way. Maybe he didn’t have the English skills to express the horror of what he had witnessed. Perhaps he thought Hal and I were engaged in some kind of weird American mating ritual. As he took us the rest of the way to our room, we were laughing so hard I worried he thought we were drunk.

A few weeks later Hal was in the rheumatologist’s office, and the doctor noted that his wrist was swollen. “Have you fallen recently?” she asked. He shook his head. Nice to have blocked the whole thing – unlike me, he doesn’t have the horror film “Narrowly Averted Medical Apocalypse” playing in his brain.

Maybe it’s fluid from gout, she said, and she suggested draining it with a needle. Luckily Hal said no. It was only the next day that he remembered about his topple into the jungle. We never did get a good picture of the macaws.

But the image of Hal, rolling on the hill? That one’s permanently etched in my brain.   It’s like the thing behind the door in the horror movie that never actually gets out, but you somehow know it’s there, waiting for you. I only hope when it comes, we will be able to do what we did this time – ride off as we laugh it away.